“CF: I realize this might be an impossible question to ask, but why is it that the manga that you want to read has those aspects, no story or anything, like that war comic?

YY: It’s very difficult to describe, but in my personal life I don’t respect human feelings. I’m very far from human society, I’d rather appreciate natural phenomena. I’m very interested in understanding how a bird might see things. I want to delete the human feelings because the reader wants to emotionally take sides with one particular person and I’d prefer they remain neutral. That’s why I don’t want to produce a scene where people feel sympathy with a particular person.”

“MH: What is your drawing process like? Perhaps this is an echo of the question above, but some of your drawings feel traced- giving the sense that there if a referent just off the page. I think it’s the simplicity of some of your linework.

AK: I love drawing from life or from references. I think it’s interesting to appropriate or reconstruct material. I mean, you have to be careful and considerate about what and how you work with anything pre-existing, but I’m interested in the way anything can be re-contextualized. I feel like, again, the Internet has totally transformed this for us, and our ability to see the various ways you can visually connect anything to build new meanings and conversations. In some ways this relates to comics in terms of how you place material on a page or in a space, things automatically begin to inform each other depending on the panels and sequencing. Simply by placing images together in an order or over a series of pages, we naturally interpret this as narrative. Therefore, the craft is in how you select those images and where you place them to evoke whatever feelings you want to give your reader.”

Derf Backderf interviewed on Robot Six. In a few years i feel like the death of the alt-weeklies is going to be a bigger deal than is generally acknowledged right now. Especially with younger cartoonists, since webcomics, like blogs, don’t have the constraints of deadlines or the permanency of print.

“Excess isn’t always easy—it’s probably exhausting sometimes—but it requires a drive separate from talent or good ideas. Fukitor has excess in abundance and little else to distinguish it. This is a work that peddles exercises in genre secondhand. This is a work that, convinced it’s a rebel, behaves like a bully.”